This invention relates to electronic commerce in general and in particular to a system and method for establishing the authenticity of a past electronic communication at the point of the consummation of the commercial endeavor which is the subject of the electronic communication, and more particularly to a system and method for allowing valuable documents to be printed on universally available paper stock.
Electronic commerce is everywhere now. People are using the Internet, as well as other remotely accessible locations, such as kiosks, to order goods and/or services. Some of these services require verification of prior payment and/or reservations at the time the service is being offered which typically is sometime after the actual purchase (or reservation) was made. For example, assume a person desires to reserve a seat on an airplane, or a room in a hotel, or a rental car, or a seat in a theatre, all from a remote terminal. Typically, that person would get into communication contact with a reservation system. This communication can be with a live person at the selling end or could be with a computer acting in an interactive mode or a combination of the two. The reservation would be made and arrangements would be made to pay for the reservation. Then the problem arises; how does the purchaser demonstrate to the gatekeeper at the airline (or to the rental car gatekeeper; or to the theatre usher or the postal delivery service) that the service has been paid for?
The obvious answer is that a ticket, stamp or other indicia of the transaction, is printed at the purchaser""s terminal and that printed ticket is used to identify that the services have been paid for. That might work when the paper stock that the receipt information is printed on is closely guarded and very distinctive. It will not work for obvious reasons where general purpose printers and widely available pare stock are used to print the receipt at the purchaser""s premises.
In situations where valuable documents such as stamps, travelers"" checks and the like, are sold, it is important to keep the unsold stock in a safe place to avoid theft and fraud. Thus, those types of valuable documents are obtainable only at specific limited locations and not universally available for purchase.
If electronic commerce is to flourish then it is mandatory to have an arrangement whereby the purchaser can obtain immediately upon purchase a printed verification of the transaction in a manner which allows for universal printing on universally available stock while still allowing the printed receipt to act as a final verification of authenticity at the point where the actual services are rendered.
These and other objects, features and technical advantages of my invention have been achieved in one embodiment where a system and method is utilized for establishing a commercially available partially preprinted form where the form has printed on it information used by the service seller during the initial transaction communication period for establishing integrity control for subsequent verification. In one embodiment, the form is available to any purchaser for use with any general purpose printer operable in conjunction with a PC or other communication/computing device, including so called xe2x80x9cdumbxe2x80x9d terminals. This form is advantageously preprinted with both human readable data and machine readable data. As will be seen, the machine readable data, which I will call an indicia, contains key information which serves to help decode material that is subsequently printed on the form under control of the central validating system.
In operation, the purchaser enters into an interaction communication with the seller of the service. This may be, by way of illustration, from the purchaser""s PC at his/her home via is the Internet to a web site maintained by the seller. The user has obtained one or more preprinted paper forms from a supplier of forms. The weight of the paper is not critical and the forms may be any weight stock. The user inputs the human readable data from the exact preprinted form that the user intends to use. This input can be by verbally reading the data or by scanning the data or by any other system. In situations when there is no human readable material preprinted on the form, the user would scan in the machine readable portion. Some portion of the preprinted data is unique to the exact form selected by the user at that time.
The seller, upon receipt of the unique data from the user pertaining to the selected form, verifies that this exact form identification number has not been previously used. Since each preprinted form has a unique identification code, this initial screening process insures that a copy of the preprinted form is not being used. The seller then uses the unique identification number to establish an encryption code for printing on the form a machine readable security indicia. It will be this security indicia that will subsequently be used in conjunction with the original preprinted indicia to verify the authenticity of the information to be printed on the form. The seller then sends information to user so that the user""s printer will print on the form all of the information that will be used by the purchaser to subsequently obtain the service.
The form that is used could be, for example, a sheet of paper divided into sections with a glue backing. The individual sections can be the size of a postage stamp (or other valuable document) and each section can (but need not) have preprinted data thereon. Each section then can be printed with information representing a value and the sections would be separated into individual stamps for use on envelopes.
For verification of the authenticity of each stamp, the original preprinted indicia from the form is read to obtain a decryption key. This key is then used to decrypt information stored in the security indicia that was printed at the time the remainder of the stamp information was printed. If the key is not present on the preprinted form, or if the key differs from the key assigned to that stamp in conjunction with the human readable data that was is inputted by the purchaser during the initial payment, then the data on the form will not be verified and the mail will be rejected.
Note that the printer can be any printing device for creating images on paper, or it could be a device for storing images which can later be displayed to obtain the goods and or services. For example, the printer can be part of a vending machine which, prior to each activation, only contains paper having on (or within) it preestablished data unique to that sheet of paper. This paper stock has very little intrinsic value. When a user desires postage (or a money order or any other document), money or credit is used and a sheet of the paper is printed as described above. The printed sheet now becomes a valuable document. In this manner a storekeeper need not maintain a large inventory of valuable stock (such as stamps or money orders) since the value is added only as needed. In the situation with stamps, this invention would reduce, or eliminate, the need for preprinting stamps, since one, two or a sheet of stamps could be printed when needed. Thus, the seller of the stamps (money orders or other document) need not maintain all of the possible denominations or variations of the documents and only need maintain the relatively valueless paper forms.
The foregoing has outlined rather broadly the features and technical advantages of the present invention in order that the detailed description of the invention that follows may be better understood. Additional features and advantages of the invention will be described hereinafter which form the subject of the claims of the invention. It should be appreciated by those skilled in the art that the conception and specific embodiment disclosed may be readily utilized as a basis for modifying or designing other structures for carrying out the same purposes of the present invention. It should also be realized by those skilled in the art that such equivalent constructions do not depart from the spirit and scope of the invention as set forth in the appended claims.